Day: September 3, 2016

We’ve all been there, sitting on the exam table as the nurse goes through the usual list of questions. Then there it is, the question I despise more than anything: On a scale of 0-10, how would you rate your current pain level? Many of us worry about giving the wrong answer, or at least the wrong impression. We don’t want to be perceived as whiners, hypochondriacs, and especially not drug seekers. We want our pain taken seriously and taken care of. While I do share these concerns, I find another concern to be of more importance.

The traditional numeric pain scale is really only meant for measuring acute pain. It is useless when it comes to the realm of chronic pain. When we battle pain for a long period of time, our perception of that pain changes, so what may have previously been a 7, we now consider to be…

I was in the process of doing research as to why credible studies consistently demonstrate that minority defendants are much more likely to face incarceration and longer prison terms than non minority offenders for having committed similar legal infractions, when I came across a commonly utilized practice that explains in part this inequity. The courts have been resorting to software based on a defendants answers to a series of questions to determine the likelihood of their being a repeat offender. The most popular software is by “Northpointe.”

You would hope that there would have been studies conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this practice to avoid another layer of unfair bias against minority suspects but this was not to be. This is problematic because there is a landmark sentencing reform bill currently under consideration by the U.S. Congress to expand the usage of these assessments.

Management at ProPublica, a legal publication decided to take on this task by analyzing this…